Oh boy… first of all sorry to hear that.

I guess by your metric the censorship is pretty harsh here as most of the popular “foreign sites” are not accessible without a VPN/Tor connection/etc. Not having YouTube is indeed quite annoying, I watch a lot of edutainment and silly videos for relaxation… and for the past two weeks I am mostly limited to my copy of modded Skyrim (which doesn’t require internet)… aaand maybe the two gacha games I’m playing if my VPN plays nice (I think I have to drop one of them now, the game server keeps refusing to log me in)

I haven’t been in China long enough to try things out yet, but I think the philosophy seems to be block all foreign sources and create Chinese versions of them. So for locals there are stuff like Bilibili and Youku which in theory would offer similar levels of entertainment/edutainment so… I’m still planning to stay in the EU as a next step, but if that doesn’t pan out then I will try to adapt to Chinese culture a bit more

On the topic of statelessness… I honestly don’t know. I am sure the PRC does not like ppl who openly speak against the government though, so I guess that is no longer an option… maybe, just maybe even Vietman and Thailand would be better places to live, they might also be authoritarian in naming but at least they are not this ridiculous

Yes! The site is named after Misaka Mikoto, since funny coin flip goes bilibili (Japanese onomatopoeia) I’m not joking

Oh boy on the point of Black Myth Wukong and Beijing’s loss of culture…

I don’t even know if ppl in China can play Black Myth Wukong without going to a specialty arcade due to the nature of its release, which IMO would feel so wrong for ppl who live here…

On the part of Beijing losing its culture, my parents decided to take me on an extended trip to Southern China, and I’m so surprised to find ancient Chinese temples and stuff here… Beijing tore all of those down… I guess Beijing is just miserable to live in now lol

I’m still using a VPN (Mullvad nontheless, I think it is as private as it gets) to browse Lemmy even though it is not blocked; I’ve literally set up a selfhosted Matrix instance so I don’t have to video chat with my parents a year or so ago; there are surveillance cameras everywhere and a lot of things scan my facial data. So… I guess the answer is “very”

I haven’t been sick enough to try one yet, but I’m hoping to do a somewhat cosmetic surgery (skin issues, nothing “cosmetic” at all) in the next month or so. We’ll see by then!

Interesting… I guess I didn’t give them enough credit, China has some of the most advanced machine learning research afterall

I guess that means my own little Hetzner server will probably be safe, but I guess that also means I should consider some backup VPNs… In any case I don’t plan to settle in China forever so I guess it is only temporary

Not really. There are some government services that are better than the US (much better public infrastructure, government seems to do some spending), but then the US is also cutthroat capitalism…

My goodness don’t get me started on that. I find Chinese hard to learn because as a native speaker I had to learn how to actually write the language, but at least Chinese has very lax grammar & things generally make sense… I am fluent in Japanese, the language is a nightmare to get used to

Using a VPN is fine. The only complicated part is that a lot of the VPNs themselves are blocked so… you kind-of have to figure out what VPN works and have it set up while outside of China

The blocklist seems to be implemented in a very straightforward fashion IMO, and if the government doesn’t know a website they wouldn’t have it on the list. Heck I think Lemmy has every right to be on that list but it isn’t blocked so… probably because it’s not popular enough that they haven’t noticed

Edit: nevermind see the other comment, maybe they do have some “more complicated” things after all

That’s really cool! Honestly, IT and privacy issues aside, I do think being able to pay everything via one app is extremely convenient. Of course personally I have some gripes with that “one app” being owned by a very evil Chinese company in China’s case but… yeah

I don’t know if that is the case… but places in China do sell a lot of gimmicky stuff. So maybe it’s just that there is a supply? I mean I could buy all of that from Aliexpress outside of China too so

Not sure why you are getting downvoted but this is actually a really interesting point of discussion…

Even when I was growing up, I think China was one of the first major international consumer markets for Japanese culture. Lots of ppl were into anime/otaku culture, lots of anime got ported over

As an extreme example, Bilibili (basically Chinese Youtube)'s namesake is the nickname of a very popular anime character in the 2010s (bonus points if anyone guesses who it is!), and back when the site first started you needed to pass an 100-question anime knowledge exam to even register an account on Bilibili

And in recent years I think China is… trying to emulate Japan? Manhua became a thing; malls and fashion seem to closely follow Japanese culture as well

So I am a Chinese citizen… Wechat is linked to a person’s national ID (Shenfenzheng), and all the payment systems assume you to have that link between your national ID-Wechat in order to work. In fact a lot of times it would also scan your face/fingerprint/etc assuming those are linked… I think if there is a parallel, it would be Elon Must/Peter Thiel’s wet dream where Paypal actually killed the credit card industry and became the primary payment system in the US

So the funny thing is… I barely saw any foreign persons during the past week at all; the only ones I can tell who are obviously foreigners (clearly not ethnically Chinese) seem to be either living close to the embassy/consulate district in Beijing of clearly here for work. And with all the surveillance and everything expecting you to have a real ID, I genuinely don’t know how a foreigner could survive in China in this day and age…

Unironically if everything goes haywire I would just ask my parents to drive me to their hometown where I have relatives who live off a farm so… I don’t have an answer as to “account gets randomly disabled”. I guess if that happens you would really just become a non-person as you said

I don’t know lol… I’m not good at making friends with Chinese people either (and that is me speaking as an ethnically and legally Chinese person), and some of them really do reinforce the negative stereotype of Chinese ppl being nasty scumbags… And the Chinese social media circle is pretty insulated from the rest of the world

But if you want, I thought there are like Chinese ppl in just about every corner of the world? So maybe it is just a matter of being able to make friends with some of them. Also I know there are like Mastodon servers for Chinese speakers and subreddits for language learning and stuff

Lemmy.world is not blocked whatsoever. But yeah I bought like half a year of Mullvad VPN before coming here. I think Reddit’s r/chinalife has a megathread on VPNs that are working as of now

Edit: I think the “Great China Firewall” is a comprehensive IP block that some government employees are adding one-by-one. Obviously stuff like Google/Facebook are blocked, but lots of other Western world sites are either not blocked or overlooked

I was born and raised in Beijing, so… yeah. I couldn’t imagine anyone learning Chinese from scratch though, the language is brutal to learn

Apparently the smog situation has… improved? I think the air quality is still not ideal but it is definitely better than what I remembered growing up